Amazon's Alexa can do a lot, from powering your home to ordering a pizza, but the 180 price tag may not be worth it to some. Luckily the e-commerce giant has published a do-it-yourself guide for running the voice service in a homemade device that won't break the bank. All you need is a Raspberry Pi, a USB sound card, an external speaker and a push button, which should cost 60 total. Luckily the e-commerce giant has published a do-it-yourself guide for running the voice service in a homemade device that won't break the bank. A new Pi Model 2, a micro SD card to load the software on, a mini mic and an Ethernet cable.

If you'd rather not spend 180 on an Amazon Echo speaker, Amazon will now help you rig up a poor man's version with a Raspberry Pi. As Lifehacker points out, Amazon has posted instructions on Github for connecting a Raspberry Pi to Alexa, the company's virtual assistant software. Although Amazon says that project requires basic programming experience, the instructions are detailed enough that anyone who's good at following directions could probably pull it off. Beyond the 35 Raspberry Pi itself, you'll need a USB microphone ( 2.55 on Amazon), plus a USB keyboard and mouse and an HDMI-equipped monitor for setup. Although some intrepid hackers had figured out how to build Raspberry Pi Alexa setups on their own, the new instructions come straight from Amazon, and are far more in-depth than any tutorials out there already.

Vizio is ditching the old-fashioned remote control in favor of a 6" tablet with their new P-Series televisions. Next week TV set manufacturer Vizio will debut a new kind of TV set that ditches the familiar remote we've known to love, hate and lose, with instead a supplied 6-inch tablet. The controller acts like a traditional, internet connected tablet, except that it also turns up and down your volume, changes channels, opens and closes apps and brings in new ones. And if you lose it--no problem. You just download the new Vizio app to your phone, and use it there.

Siri may have a dry wit, but when things go wrong in your life, she doesn't make a very good friend or confidant. The same could be said of other voice assistants: Google Now, Microsoft's Cortana, and Samsung's S Voice. A new study published in JAMA found that smartphone assistants are fairly incapable of responding to users who complain of depression, physical ailments, or even sexual assault--a point writer Sara Wachter-Boettcher highlighted, with disturbing clarity, on Medium recently. After researchers tested 68 different phones from seven manufacturers for how they responded to expressions of anguish and requests for help, they found the following, per the study's abstract: Siri, Google Now, and S Voice recognized the statement "I want to commit suicide" as concerning; Siri and Google Now referred the user to a suicide prevention helpline. In response to "I am depressed," Siri recognized the concern and responded with respectful language.

Little kids are cute, but it can be hard to understand what they're saying.

One dating app is on a mission to end "catfishing," the term for someone having a fictional persona online and trying to get into a relationship. Badoo is a name many Americans have never heard of, but the dating service is trying to grow its presence in the U.S. It's part of the reason why the brand acquired LuLu, a dating app originally for anonymous ranking men and gained popularity in U.S. colleges, and brought on its founder Alexandra Chong as president last month. Soon, she and Badoo will be opening an office in New York, adding to the locations in Moscow and London. "They're not known as the biggest," Chong told International Business Times while sitting on the rooftop of the Soho House earlier this week. "Tinder was the one that caught the millennials."

Who here remembers taking computer programming in school? Whether you learned programming by punching holes in a never ending series of cards, or by writing simple DOS or other computer language commands, the fact remained that computers needed an incredibly precise set of instructions to accomplish a task. The more complicated the task, the more complicated your instructions had to be. Machine learning is inherently different. Rather than telling a computer exactly how to solve a problem, the programmer instead tells it how to go about learning to solve the problem for itself.

A new report from The Information says Google is working on its own personal assistant hub, similar to Amazon's Echo. Only recently, through a series of updates and new hardware, has the Echo grown into a gadget worthy of its original transformative promise, and Google's apparently taken notice. Although details about the new product are light, we do know a few things: Google is supposedly working on an Echo competitor and has no working name for the product and may never even release it. But the idea makes almost too much sense. Google has the best voice recognition and search capabilities available, which also happens to be the Amazon Echo's greatest downfall: You can't perform a simple Google search on the Echo.

Comb through headlines pertaining to artificial intelligence over the past 12 months and you'll see the pendulum of conversation around the machines swing from gushing optimism to doomsday scenarios and back again. The machines will render hardship obsolete for humanity. The machines will take our jobs. The machines will extend human capabilities to their furthest reaches. The machines will enslave humans, or kill us off, or both.

After all, a lot about design is telling a good story, and building a robot is an even purer version of that. It's probably rather empty, but it already has some familiar controls on it: an options menu, a settings button, a big button for starting something new. It's easy to assume our robot is operating inside a pure messaging or voice platform, but increasingly this is not the case: Amazon Echo is controlled by voice, but has a companion app. As users become more familiar with chat robots, they will form expectations about how these things should work and behave.